Late that afternoon, Eleanor walked into the small conference room where they’d left me with a bottle of water and a stack of balance sheets.
“How did it go?”
“I believe three of them hate me.”
“Only three? Excellent.” She sat down across from me. “I need to tell you something, Christopher.”
“What?”
“The position you just interviewed for isn’t available.”
My stomach dropped through my chair.
“Oh.”
Eleanor folded her hands on the table.
“I lied to you. There was never an opening for Director of Human Capital Strategy.”
I almost laughed. “Are you kidding me?”
“No.”
“Then why did I just spend six hours interviewing?”
“Because I needed my board to meet you.”
I felt frustration rising in my chest. “Eleanor, I’m not interested in games. I have a mortgage. I have kids.”
“Neither am I,” she said.
She slid a thick binder across the table.
“Open it.”
I did. The title page said:
HALSTON COMMUNITY VENTURES — FORMATION PLAN
“What is this?”
“A new company.”
“For what?”
“For small businesses.” She leaned back in her chair. “Every year, thousands of good businesses in this country fail because nobody thinks they’re big enough to matter. Family restaurants. Small manufacturers. Rural clinics. Repair shops. Bakeries. Wall Street won’t look at anything under fifty million dollars. Banks won’t lend to them. So they close, and the people who work there lose everything.”
She tapped the binder.
“I want to build an investment fund for the companies everyone else ignores. A hundred and fifty million dollars to start. Patient money. Fair terms. No stripping them for parts.”
“That sounds admirable.”
“You’re going to run it.”
I froze.
“No.”
Eleanor smiled. “Yes.”
“I have zero investment experience.”
“You’ll have a chief investment officer. She spent twenty years at Goldman Sachs. She’s terrifying. You’ll like her.”
“I don’t know private equity.”
“You know people.”
“That keeps being your answer.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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